Apple's Cook expects work from home, remote learning trends to continue

AppleInsider

CEO Tim Cook says that Apple has seen growth in sales to remote students and home workers, and believes that trend is going to continue

Tim Cook

Asked about seasonal fluctuations in Apple's sales, CEO Tim Cook has spoken about the increase in orders from the number of people working from home because of the coronavirus

"The growth [in iPads and Macs] last quarter was phenomenal," said Cook. "I think the moves that have taken place to [have people take up] remote learning and remote work are not going to go back to normal."

Speaking during the company's latest financial earnings call, Apple revealed that Mac sales rose to $8 billion for the quarter. That compares to $6.99 billion for this time last year, before the coronavirus pandemic. CFO Luca Maestri said that these sales figures came even as supplies of both the Mac and the iPad had been constrained.

"These are tremendous numbers," commented Cook. "As Luca said, the September quarter was the all-time high for Mac in the history of the company. And not just by a little bit, by $1.6 billion, so it was a substantial difference."

The iPad was also up, this time to $6.8 billion for the quarter, as compared to $4.66 billion last year. While Apple did announce the iPad Air 4 during the quarter, it didn't start taking pre-orders for it until October 16.

Nonetheless, the iPad's overall revenue exceeded Apple's internal projections for the period, and again it appears to be because of demand from people working from home.

"Normal will become something different," he continued, "because I think people are learning that there are aspects of this that work well. So I don't believe that we're going to go back to where we were."

"Remote working is not something that's going to snap back to the way it used to be any time soon," he concluded.

multimedia

Bring on the mini LED iPads for 2021! Looking forward to next Friday November 6 at 5am Pacific to order my new Pacific Blue 512GB iPhone 12 Pro Max from Xfinity Mobile.

entropys

So complete and deep integration with MS services then so there is absolutely no need for corporate IT to continue to exclude Macs from consideration?

pulseimages

No kidding.

randominternetperson

Hopefully remote learning (K-12 anyway) fades away, but remote work is here to stay.  Personally, I expect that I’ll never commute into the office more than a day or two a week the rest of my career after rarely teleworking prior to the -19. 

normang

Remote Learning needs to be very short-lived, if Cook thinks thats a good thing, he needs to figure out how Children learn and socialize, Since he 's never had children that I am aware of, perhaps he needs to re-think that... instead of a way to sell more iPads..

arlor

As a professor, I can say that remote learning is a mess. It might get better with practice, or better technology, but it really makes me wonder whether remote working is really much better -- at least when it comes to the needs of new employees who need to learn a company's rhythms and procedures. A stable team that knows how to work together might be fine switching to remote, but how does it go when you add new people? Do they really integrate? 

philboogie

normang said:

Remote Learning needs to be very short-lived, if Cook thinks thats a good thing, he needs to figure out how Children learn and socialize, Since he 's never had children that I am aware of, perhaps he needs to re-think that... instead of a way to sell more iPads..

Spot-on post! CoViD-19 is terrible, but its ramifications are terrible as well. Especially for children, but also for people working from home.